Rebel cafe Burkina Faso is the main market for coffee, cocoa and cotton from the rebel-controlled areas and a useful base for rebel chiefs, including Forces Nouvelles leader Guillaume Soro, who chooses to hold press conferences in Ouagadougou rather than Bouaké...

Ivorian mutinies tend to be motivated less by politics than by pay and conditions (although Guillaume Soro, of the Forces Nouvelles, claims that he manipulated the pay-related mutiny in September 2002 for northern political ends)...

Gbagbo's arch-rival Alassane Ouattara, Forces Nouvelles leader Guillaume Soro and the long-suffering interim Prime Minister Seydou Diarra put their side of the story during visits to South Africa last month...

Gbagbo's skill at dividing and ruling may even have stretched to an uneasy alliance against Guillaume Soro's ex-rebel Mouvement Patriotique de la Côte d'Ivoire (MPCI) with Soro's political rival, the dissident rebel Ibrahim Coulibaly, known as 'IB'...